Douglas F Shearer

Broken Comments

It has come to my attention that a change to my comments system made two months ago didn’t go so well.

I had intended for all spam comments to be deleted immediately. This was happening, but a bug caused all good comments to be saved, but marked as spam.

Fixed now. Apologies to all those affected, I’ll reply as soon as I can.

Spam begone!

For the moment I have disabled automatic publishing of comments until I implement a spam filtering system. Some of my very popular posts such as my K750i review are attracting a lot of spam I would prefer not to have. It is annoying that a proprietary comments system can be leveraged by the spam monkeys, they obviously have too much time on their hands.

I am still accepting comments, but I will have to review them before they are published on the site.

Update – Comments are automatically posted again! Except if you’re a spam bot, as you’ll see…

I have now installed the Akismet spam filtering system on my blog. Is very easy to set up, and only took me a few minutes. It’s primarily a Wordpress tool, but there are various different implementations of it available for other blogging tools, as well as barebone PHP4 classes, PHP5 classes, and many other web scripting languages. Go take a look if you want this sort of functionality on your blog.

Update 2 – It seems word has got round all the spammers about my site! Now hat I have erradicated the comment spam, I am getting referer spam which fills my stats with false users and addresses for sites of questionable legality and ethics. Suffice to say I’ll be installing Bad Behaviour at the first opportunity I have!

Rugby, Walk the Line, And Comments

Not had a blog post for a wee while so going to get some random stuff here:

For a change Scotland won the rugby! We actually bet the French in the 6 nations! The boys did real well, although their form did start to fade a bit in the second half. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I got to watch the game at work. 20-16 was the final score. Video highlights can be seen at the BBC Sport site. (Picture from BBC sport website).

After the pub (To celebrate the win in the rugby) I went to the cinema with some of the guys from work. We went to see Walk The Line at the fabulous Cameo Cinema. I really like the work of Johnny Cash, and this film was an excellent dramatisation of his life. I challenge you not to tap your feet during all the musical numbers!

Finally, I have updated the comments system on my blog. I can now ban IP addresses of those who keep posting unwanted messages, or those with consistently bad language. That’ll keep certain bike shop employees from misusing the system! You know who you are guys!